Twitter – How We Network.

When it comes to following people on Twitter, there is a common misconception to which we all are victims of (so to speak), including myself. Common logic says, follow the people of your kind or vertical. So, for example, I follow mostly people in the payments, banking, money-transfer and fintech space. Lots of such people. I do so because I feel it will connect me with the right people and I will gain a lot of intelligence from the tweets that the people I follow, put out.

Turns out, that’s the wrong approach. If I follow people within my own field, chances are we are all following each other and the idea generation becomes stale and stagnant. Fresh ideas cannot cultivate inside such an ecosystem.

A new paper by Salvatore Parise (associate professor of information systems at Babson College), Eoin Whelan (lecturer in business information systems at the J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway) and Steve Todd (vice president of strategy and innovation at EMC Corporation) titled “How Twitter Users Can Generate Better Ideas” studies how your following and followers can aid your idea generation.

About Faisal Khan

Faisal Khan is a banking / payments consultant specializing in cross-border payment system and a digital money evangelist. He is the co-host of Around The Coin, a weekly podcast on Payments & Fintech with over 18,000+ listeners. Mr. Khan is a talent scout for Series A & B financing for various fintech VCs/funds. He is also a frequent contributor to popular Q&A site Quora where he has been a Quora 5 consecutive years. His official website is at https://faisalkhan.com